About Me

Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

"Fight for Freedom" Town Hall aired by (Washington DC) WJLA "News Channel 8" as part of its "Your Voice, Your Future" series; I am in the audience

ABC affiliate WJLA aired the “Town Hall: Fight for Freedom:
Your Voice, Your Future” from its headquarters in the Rosslyn “downtown” area
of Arlington VA, almost on the Potomac River.

This broadcast is the latest in a
series of Roundtables (half hour, no audience) and Townhalls (one hour, with
studio audience) aired at 7 PM EST on
some weeknights on News Channel 8 in Washington. I was in the audience, on the second row, and
this time the event was in the Second Floor Studio of the building, rather than
in the Arisphere (which is larger and which is easier to move around in).

There was a technical issue in that we could not hear some
of the outside feeds during the show.

The panelists were Frank Gaffney from the Center for
Security Policy (link), Clifford May from Foundation for Defense of Democracies (link) Jane Hall, journalism professor at
American University (link), and Faheem Younus (“Muslimerican”,link) as well
as, remote, Representative Scott Perry (R-PA), direct line from
Harrisburg. Jeff Barnum moderated.

Scott Thuman reported on several stories, including a
decision by Japan not to allow its journalists to travel to Syria and Iraq,
after the recent execution of another Japanese journalist by ISIS. He also reported on a blizzard of “copythreat”
threats against commercial airline flights on Twitter, which can be traced and
can result in 5 years in prison. Another
clip concerns the use of flashy social media to recruit young men and women
from western countries, a campaign that works mostly in Europe but that has
resulted in the arrests of a few young people from the US.

One of the audience, a Muslim woman, challenged Gaffney for
his alleges support of Islamaphobia.
Later questions concerned whether the US should put “boots on the ground”
in Syria. But the most important
question may have been those concerned about how journalists can continue
honest reporting, when ISIS attacks them and executes them. The honest answer was, maybe, we can’t. Totalitarian societies go to great lengths to
prevent information about what is going on to get out.

But the most sobering moment came when Gaffney mentioned
Salman Rushdie, the target of a fatwa from Iran in the early 1980s for the book
“Satanic Verses”. True, the threat came
from Shiite rather than Sunni Islam. But
it shows that the concern isn’t limited to just drawings and cartoons. Gaffney said that European nations should
have withdrawn diplomats from Iran immediately.
Instead, they told Rushdie, a British subject and definitely not a
resident or subject of Iran or any other Muslim country, to hire bodyguards and
that “he had a problem.” That is when
free speech in the west became jeopardized.

As for the cartoons, Younus said that not publishing images
of Muhammad should be a matter of conscience, not law, but he compared the
practice to using the “n” or “f” words in the US (to refer to “blacks” or “gays”).

Later Younus got into a debate with the other panelists on
whether there is something in Islam that condones violence against non-Muslim
civilians as justified by religious scripture.
There was some discussion of the scope of Sharia law, particularly when
it deals with secular interactions with non-Muslims. Some of it got heated. There was a suggestion, from Gaffney at least, that the point of the ISIS behavior extends beyond scripture to simply a need to control others ("apostates") as part of the ideology, a religious analogue to Hitler or Stalin (or Kim Jong-Un).

The audience included several Muslims, and several
journalism students from American University.
I was in the queue to ask a question but time ran out. So I asked the question of the panelists in
person after the broadcast. I was going
to ask them to comment on the (Cato Institute) book “The Tyranny of Silence” by
Flemming Rose from the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, at the time of the
Cartoon Controversy in 2005. The book
was written before the assassination of Charlie Hebdo and other journalists in
Paris in January 2015. I would have
mentioned Moly Norris. Gaffney
immediately reacted to my mentioning her name, and regretted likewise not
having time (in just one hour) to get to the implications of how her situation
was handled by the FBI (similar to Rushdie, who did not go into hiding or
change names). I don’t think we have a word in our vocabulary
for this problem, it’s a kind of “socialization-induced chilling effects” familiar
in ganga and organized crime. Alfred
Hitchcock has explored this problem (as close as ever in cinema) with his two versions of “The Man Who Knew
Too Much”.

This forum could have used a full 90 minutes.

Update (later 2/10): NBC News just released a news story about hacking social media of a military spouse, here. This is along the lines of the Town Hall, but in a critical area we didn't have enough time to cover.

No comments:

Analytics

Privacy Policy

Privacy Policy for billboushkcf.blogspot.com

If you require any more information or have any questions about my privacy policy, please feel free to contact me by email at JBoushka@aol.com.

At billboushakcf.blogspot.com , the privacy of my visitors is of extreme importance to me. This privacy policy document outlines the types of personal information is received and collected by billboushkcf.blogspot.com and how it is used.

Log Files Like many other Web sites, billboushkcf.blogspot.com makes use of log files. The information inside the log files includes internet protocol ( IP ) addresses, type of browser, Internet Service Provider ( ISP ), date/time stamp, referring/exit pages, and number of clicks to analyze trends, administer the site, track user’s movement around the site, and gather demographic information. IP addresses, and other such information are not linked to any information that is personally identifiable.

Cookies and Web Beacons billboushkacf.blogspot.com does not use cookies.

DoubleClick DART Cookie

.:: Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on billboushkacf.blogspot.com .
.:: Google's use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to your users based on their visit to billboushkacf.blogspot.com and other sites on the Internet.
.:: Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy at the following link.

Some of my advertising partners may use cookies and web beacons on my site. My advertising partners include ....... Google Adsense

These third-party ad servers or ad networks use technology to the advertisements and links that appear on billboushkacf.blogspot.com send directly to your browsers. They automatically receive your IP address when this occurs. Other technologies ( such as cookies, JavaScript, or Web Beacons ) may also be used by the third-party ad networks to measure the effectiveness of their advertisements and / or to personalize the advertising content that you see.

billboushkacf.blogspot.com has no access to or control over these cookies that are used by third-party advertisers.

You should consult the respective privacy policies of these third-party ad servers for more detailed information on their practices as well as for instructions about how to opt-out of certain practices. billboushkacf.blogspot.com 's privacy policy does not apply to, and we cannot control the activities of, such other advertisers or web sites.

If you wish to disable cookies, you may do so through your individual browser options. More detailed information about cookie management with specific web browsers can be found at the browsers' respective websites.